How to Make Chicken-Fried Steak with Gravy

Want to know how to make chicken-fried steak and gravy with less fat and salt? We skip the deep frying, but flavorful country gravy makes up for the loss.

Hey, everyone, I'm Judith with recipe.com. Today, I'm gonna be showing you how to make a Chicken Fried Steak with Gravy, a good all American Classic. So, what you gonna need for this is 1 pound of beef top round steak. We've cut this into 4 serving size pieces. We have 1/3 cup of milk. We have 1 small onion, which we've cut in 2 wings, 1 beaten egg, 3/4 of cup of dried bread crumbs, 2 tablespoons of cooking oil, 2 tablespoons of all purpose flour, 1 tablespoon of milk, 1/2 teaspoon of dried basil, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper. So, first things first, let us get our steak. Now, this is a really lean steak. So, we're gonna need to tenderize this. We're gonna need to break it down to get it nice and thin so it would be easier to fry. So, what we're gonna do is get our plastic wrap or if you have a zip lock, that will work too, and we're gonna place each steak between 2 pieces of plastic wrap and we're gonna get our meat tenderizer and we're gonna give a good bang. We have our meat here folded into our plastic wrap and now it's time to get your meat tenderizer. If you don't have one of these, you could use a hammer, something really hard and sturdy, but the idea is to get our meat into a nice thin steak. It's 1/2 an inch now, so we wanna get it to about a 1/4 inch. So, we're gonna give a nice pound. Well, we pounded out all 4 of our steaks right here. So, it's a nice thin steak. It will be excellent for frying now. So, let's get our bread crumb and egg mixture because that's gonna make a nice coating for our steaks and a shallow dish. Let's mix in our dried bread crumbs. We're gonna also put our basil in there and our salt and pepper. So, that's gonna be nice coating for our steaks, so we just mix all that in with our fingers right now. So, now we're gonna get our mixture together. So, we'll put our beaten egg into large bowl or dish and a 1 tablespoon of milk. Be sure not to use our 1/3 cup of milk because that is gonna be used later for our gravy. So put that aside. We'll whisk that all in together. Now, let's get coating. So, our steaks are ready to go. So, we'll get one of our steaks. We'll dip in the egg mixture and we're gonna dip it in that bread crumb mixture. It's gonna be nice and crisp. There we go, and we'll set that aside, and we'll do that with all 4 steaks. So our steaks are ready for frying. We've got here a 12-inch heavy cast iron skillet and this gonna be the perfect tool for our frying. So, we've got it to a medium heat and what we wanna do is put our cooking oil in there. That's gonna crackle because we've got it nice and hot, and we want to place our steak in there to get it nice and brown. So put them in there and we wanna give them 3 minutes on each side. So, our meat is nice and brown now. Now, we wanna reduce the temperature to low, and we're cook that covered for about 45 to 60 minutes. Well, it's been about 50 minutes and our steak is done. As you can see, it's nice and brown. It's cooked all the way through and so it's beautiful and tender. So, we're gonna set those steaks aside for the moment. You can cover them in foil to keep them warm. With the remainder of our pan drippings from our skillet, we can use that to make our gravy. There's a lot of great flavor already in there. So, we'll put it to a medium heat. We might need to add a little bit more oil. That's all dried a little like so, and then we're gonna add in our onions, so we're gonna get our onions nice and tender. Well, our onions got nice and soft there. So it's time to add in our flour. So, in goes the flour and that's gonna be the base of gravy to make it nice and thick, just give that a little quick stir, and we're gonna add in all of our milk immediately, and we're just gonna stir that a few minutes until it gets nice and thick and bubbly. So our gravy is thick indeed beautifully, smells amazing, looks just as good and I will just sprinkle it with a little bit of salt and pepper to taste and that is done now. We can spoon that over our steak. So, let's take it off the heat. We have one of our steak here on the platter and let's just spoon up beautiful onion mixture on top, full of flavor, really delicious. Who doesn't like nice soft onion pan fried steak and there you go. That is a really impressive dinner for any night of the week. That's how you make a Chicken Fried Steak with Gravy.